>By not raising their prices, the stores enable the hoarding, speculation and secondary market nonsense you are blabbering about. By threatening to fine vendors when they raise prices, the government enables these arbitrage schemes.
Prices going up does not achieve the goal of enabling universal access to current supply in order to damp the strain on the currently existing medical/distribution infrastructure, which is the primary goal to be achieved in a global pandemic situation. By looking at the problem through a primarily economic lens, the resulting world does not accurately reflect those meddlesome details that economists handwave. Like the fact that there are portions of the population that won't be able to make the tradeoff of paying higher prices for these goods, and still get other necessities. That trade-off, more shock to the medical infrastructure before we have effective mitigation/treatment is not the kind of thing we can just handwave through more money.
Furthermore, it isn't price hiking that is so much an issue as unconscionable price-hiking facilitated by sub-optimal logistics, or outright greed. The end problem is getting supplier output to an area where people in need can get it. Any unnecessary obstacles in that chain for the express purpose of profit-taking are the problem.
>You and many like you seem to think that being in favor is the same thing as being in favor of the hoarding and speculation. But that is not true.
Saying that is is easy, but it doesn't make it true. People interpret the baseline increase of price as being an externally imposed privation. This degenerates to a man v. society response encouraging an every-man-for-themselves attitude which doesn't result in an optimal outcome, and instead encourages the type of half-thought out environment where you'll find desperate secondary market buyers, and secondary market suppliers creating a self-reinforcing disruption created by seeking sources of dwindling supply to reroute everywhere else willy-nilly. The system thrashes, in short. A non-price surge mediated response however aims at enabling access to the resource across the board, and degenerates down to a logistics problem of getting product from here to there and matching replacement rates with consumption rates in lock-step. This approach doesn't inspire fear, but instead relies on wide-scale disciplined thinking, along with the ability to know with reasonable certainty that product earmarked for a particular geographical area is still there.
>I also am not arguing against sellers choosing to limit quantities, that is their prerogative.
We are agreed somewhere!
>I'm arguing against government intervention when the market will address this all on its own. The Mayor of New York City seems to be in your club. He is arguing for the nationalization of industries to solve the shortages.
To be clear, the only "government intervention" I'm advocating for is for the prosecution of those that participate in widespread buying out of supply for arbitrage purposes in order to ensure the primary market with visibility is the primary means of distribution, and to minimize the level of chaos. I in no way endorse transition of manufacturer or distributor, or logistical mover to government control. Hence my advocation of The enactment of voluntary purchase limits by the end distributor. I'm not that hot on nationalization, nor do I believe we're at the point where things are severe enough for the overhead of having to legislate out the details involved in fully specifying the response. I'm just trying to make it clear that right now everyone is in the same boat, and the best way forward is to not let ourselves fall to the temptation to turn a universal crisis into a mint. The entire system can handle it as long as we give it the room to work while at the same time constraining it to work for the end goal of not enriching a few outrageously, but getting things where they need to be.
We may be somewhat talking passed each other for some reason. The only major difference I'm seeing in our approaches after a few re-reads and attempts at trying to coax out an alternate message from what you wrote is I'm coming at it from the grounds of a logistics problem, and you from the economic market side, where mine makes the implicit assumption the work must be done, and yours doesn't seem to account for that axiom in any way, or at least in a way explicit enough for my sensibilities.
>Which is it? Information does or doesn't propagate quickly?
It's both. Social signals such as shame or disapproval travel quickly and can facilitate rapid modification of individual behavior based on consistent responses to undesired behavior. Logistical signalling is not that. It requires existing relationships, confirmation that funding is staged properly, several stages of analysis and propagation through particular human actors who are still burdened with everything else that isn't the crisis as well. These are longer cycle signals that are more rigid, but most importantly, have exhaustive levels of in place infrastructure to increase the visibility of the overall signal; something lacking in secondary markets.
Again, to summarize:
>Not advocating nationalization.
>Am advocating intervention where purchasing for arbitrage purpose disrupts the smooth logistical flow of output (I.e. buying out the next town's supply to sell at a markup online)
>Universal access is the priority until the severity of the crisis is dampened sufficiently by developing herd immunity/vaccines/treatment
>Do not be a dick. If someone else you know is being a duck, make sure they know it; because now isn't the time for it.
>Stable logistical picture facilitates smooth Market based optimization without excessive distortions created by ghost supply flow.
>Don't Panic.
That's it.